Google Reader + Facebook Application = Digg killer?

Mario Romero has built something very interesting that’s getting more interesting all the time.

If I weren’t on Facebook and didn’t have his Google Reader application plugged into Facebook I would totally have missed it.

If you come and visit my Facebook Profile page (which is what we call a home page in Facebook land) you’ll see that I have a Google Reader component on that page with the latest headlines from my link blog. That’s Mario’s code that’s doing that.

But if you just stopped there you’d be missing what Mario just turned on.

Add that component to your own Facebook Profile and hook it up to YOUR OWN Google Reader shared page (I call it a link blog, but Google calls them “Shared Items.”).

If you do, you’ll see a page that lets you see your shared items, your friends’ shared items, and top shared items.

Wait a second, top shared items?

Yeah! But only from other Facebookers. It shows you top items for the past 12 hours, or 24 hours, or 48 hours, or the past week. And it shows how many times each item was shared.

This is the beginning of something really killer. It’s something I wanted Google to do — Google could put out a Digg-style killer that’d be a lot harder to game. Admittedly this isn’t to the level of a Digg killer yet, but it is gathering steam at a very rapid pace. There’s a lot of smart people using Google Reader — Eric Auchard at Reuters is on the list, for instance. That’ll lead to a lot better news than Digg picks on an average day.

It’s not finished, yet. I wish he’d let me click on the results and see WHO linked to each item. But this has already brought me some new blogs I didn’t know about.

The “Your Friend’s Shared Items” is already becoming a great directory of other people’s Google Reader’s Shared Items. More than 220 of my almost 3,000 friends already have added Mario’s Facebook application to their profile. Imagine the data if everyone started doing a shared feed from Google Reader and added Mario’s app to their profile!

Anyway, I’m already in love with this app, developed in Mexico by Mario. It demonstrates that a new kind of app is possible when you mix RSS into Facebook’s platform. Thanks! Oh, and it works and hasn’t failed since I added it a couple of weeks ago. Can’t wait to see what Mario does next.

Hey, Roi Carthy, do you get the power of “we are media” yet? This is just the tip of the iceberg that’s coming at us.

UPDATE: Mario just sent me a message on Facebook and said that even more features are coming in the next day or two.